“Scheduled to ship in October, Leopard introduces over 300 new features, including a new Desktop and Dock with Stacks, an intuitive new way to organize files; an updated Finder featuring Cover Flow™ and a new way to easily browse and share files between multiple Macs; Quick Look, a new way to rapidly preview most files without opening an application; Time Machine, a new way to easily and automatically back up and restore lost files or a complete Mac®; Spaces, a powerful new feature to create groups of applications and instantly switch between them; and enhanced iChat and Mail applications, which easily allow users to communicate even more creatively,” according to Apple.

Leopard also features the new technologies that take full advantage of the latest developments in processor hardware: full native 64-bit support to enable applications to take complete advantage of 64-bit processing while still running side by side with existing 32-bit Mac OS X applications and drivers; easy multi-core optimization and scheduling to take advantage of the latest Intel hardware; and Core Animation, helping developers easily create animated user experiences as amazing as Leopard’s Spaces and Time Machine in their own applications.

Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard is scheduled to ship in October and will be sold for a suggested retail price of $129 for a single user license.

Source

The company says the Leopard’s launch is delayed, because it had to borrow engineering and QA resources from its operating system team in order to finish software for iPhone device on time.

“iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October,” Apple published.

“Analysts, however, are concerned that Apple has yet to publicize the promised “secret features” of Leopard. Apple is expected to highlight Mac OS X Leopard at ths year’s annual developer conference in June,” Associated Content reports.

The rumors about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard delay started last week when Digi Times reported that it will be postponed to October 2007 to allow Apple to make new 64-bit operating system support Windows Vista through an integrated version of Boot Camp software.

“The sources pointed out that the launch delay is not due to software design problems with Leopard but instead is attributed to Apple’s plan to have its new OS support Windows Vista through an integrated version of Boot Camp. Boot Camp is an Apple software application that currently assists in the installation of Windows XP on computers using Apple’s latest OS. The company hopes with support for Vista, Mac computers using the new OS can grab more market share,” Digi Times has learned at industry sources.

Apple was previously expected to ship it’s Leopard OS in spring this year.

Digi Times

“It’s definitely a ‘when’ question, not an ‘if’, and there are a lot of factors involved,” Byer said in his blog.

But, he reminded that a 64-bit version of Photoshop would have to be a completely separate binary from the 32-bit version, causing an extra cost.

“A separate binary has a huge cost associated with it (in terms of features we can’t do because we have to spend resources elsewhere). Quality assurance is a big part of that - you essentially have to dive in and test every corner of the app for each binary, across the matrix of supported operating systems - but there are also many ancillary pieces that add to that cost as well. And given that a Universal Binary application really is two separate binaries smashed together (and accounting for the kinds of issues that an application can have going from big endian (PPC) to little endian) we already had a lot of extra cost going through this cycle. Adding the cost of adding a 64-bit version to the mix of things that were already on the have-to-do list - especially in light of the very limited benefits - and doing a 64-bit version this cycle really became an unreasonable thing to think about it,” Byer explained.

He assumes that number of Photoshop customers running the 64-bit Windows Vista will be very small over the next couple of years. Also, since Macintosh OS X 10.4 isn’t fully 64-bit - many of the libraries an application would need to be fully 64-bit aren’t available, so Mac users currently could not run a 64-bit version of Photoshop, even if it is available.

Scott Byer’s Blog

“Overall, performance feels improved with the latest build of Leopard but stability remains a significant issue, even with such basic items as System Preferences or Preview. Apple has also curiously removed keyboard navigation from Spaces in 9A321, suggesting bugs remain to be ironed out with that feature, as well,” according to the report.

Think Secret also provides Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard 9A321 screenshots.

Apple previewed Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard, the sixth major version of Mac OS X, to its third party developers in August this year. Apple announced that it is scheduled to ship in spring 2007.

The Leopard offers 64-bit computing along with 32-bit legacy support without emulation.

The company says users currently must use 32-bit Flash Player in 32-bit browser to view Flash content on a 64-bit operating system. In 64-bit Windows Vista both 64-bit and emulated 32-bit Internet Explorer are installed by default. Linux users must install 32-bit browser and 32-bit Flash Player plug-in on their 64-bit operating systems.

Since 64-bit Linux users downgrade their browsers for years in order to use Flash, and since Microsoft’s 64-bit Vista (retail) and Apple’s 64-bit Mac OS X Leopard operating systems are scheduled to ship in January and spring 2007 respectively, we hope that 64-bit Flash will be released by then.

Dean Pullen in his article for The Inquirer sees Leopard’s non-emulated support for 32-bit applications and drivers as a great advantage compared to 64-bit version of Windows Vista.

“Note that the non-emulated support in OSX is for applications and drivers. 32-bit programs on Vista 64 need to work on WOW emulation to run in Vista, and 32-bit drivers are a no-no. Lack of driver support is the main reason Windows XP x64 hasn’t been widely adopted, and why the Vista fudge will ensure hardware incompatibilities between the two Windows versions remain for sometime to come.

This is quite a boon for OSX, and one that should be highlighted frequently and often,” says Pullen.

64-bit Leopard knocks spots off Vista

Apple’s pointed new features of Mac Leopard operating system includes Time Machine, a new way to automatically back up and restore everything on Mac, and Spaces to instantly switch between groups of applications required for various tasks. There are also improvement to Spotlight, a search feature, and improved iChat, as well as a new Dashboard feature that will contain around 2,500 Widgets. So called Core Animation developer tool, which will be part of the updated Mac OS X, can be used to create motion graphics with only little coding.

Leopard is scheduled to ship in spring 2007.

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